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It’s been a steep learning curve, discovering how to use canva, draft2digital, bookfunnel, hostinger and campayn, but I’ve finally produced a marketing campaign for my yet-to-be-published novel The Hammond Conjecture. It should be out in the summer. Please click on the link on the main page, to get your free download of the first six chapters.

I submitted it to 8 agents, researched from the WAY. No response at all from most of them. Two sent personal responses. The major agent for sci-fi novels wrote that “I can see the imagination and intelligence at work here, but I can’t honestly say I loved it. The entry level for a new novelist now is ‘special’, not ‘good’.”

I found jerichowriters.com from a google search. Signed up for their newsletter. In response I received links to three one-hour videos on 3 consecutive days. The first, a panel of female literary agents looking at slushpile submissions and giving their reactions, would have been interesting if not for the atrocious sound and unorganised presentation.

When I discovered my late father’s diaries and papers in 2016, I realised that the public deserved to know the suppressed facts about Operation Pentacle. A friend put me in touch with MB Reed. After reading all the documents, he persuaded me that publishers would not be willing to touch it (and it would probably be banned under the Official Secrets Act). Instead, he should present it as a work of fiction. I now wonder if I should have agreed to this. The ‘humourous’ episodes in the story are MB Reed’s invention.

I started the novel “The Hammond Conjecture” as a change from the alternate-history novels such as “SS-GB”, “Fatherland”, “Dominion” et al, which all depict Britain after Germany had won the War as an unremittingly bleak and hellish, ‘1984’-style dystopia. It is also a reaction to the hagiography of Winston Churchill in those novels.